Thomas Barlow & Bro Ltd
Thomas Barlow was the youngest of seven children. His father was John Barlow, a Quaker of Alderley Edge, Cheshire. In 1848, Thomas Barlow founded the firm Barlow & Co. in Manchester, manufacturing and trading in textiles in the UK. From the mid-1850s the firm started importing cotton from America and began exporting textiles to India and the Far East. In 1864 he founded Thomas Barlow & Bro. and during the 1870s and 1880s established his own trade agencies in Calcutta, Shanghai and Singapore to export goods from the UK, to import tea and coffee, and to acquire his own plantations in these regions.
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During the last two decades of the 19th Century, Thomas’s eldest son John Emmott Barlow began to steer the family firm away from textiles to develop its interests in agency work, in the export of iron and steel, and in tea and coffee, which led to the acquisition of a bonded tea warehouse in London. In 1891 the Barlows took over the ailing textile importers Scott & Co. in Singapore and began to extend their business to coffee estates. When the crop failed in the late 1890s, business was diverted to planting rubber trees. In 1906 a number of estates combined to form the Highlands and Lowlands Para Rubber Co., with Sir Frank Swettenham as chairman and the firm Barlow & Co. as its agents in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, while the partnership of Thomas Barlow & Bro. acted as secretaries in England.
The inter-war years saw a further decline of the British textile business and increasing problems for tea plantations, due to the rise of Indian nationalism and civil war in China. Of John Emmott Barlow’s two sons Sir John Denham Barlow inherited his father’s political ambition. He was M.P. (Liberal) for Eddisbury 1945-49 and then Conservative M.P. for Middleton and Prestwich 1951-66.
John Emmott Barlow’s second son, Thomas Bradwell Barlow, spent his entire life working in the family business. At the beginning of his career he spent six months in Kuala Lumpur before joining the London office, and developed a lasting interest in the rubber industry. This, and the Great Depression of the 1930s, led to the closure of the Barlow agencies in Calcutta and Shanghai, leaving their interests concentrated on the Malay peninsula and in rubber, though fluctuations in the market led to experiments and diversification into other crops, such as copra and palm oil. The Japanese occupation of Malaya during WW2 closed down the estates and scattered staff, many of whom perished during internment. Post-war reconstruction was made difficult by the Communist insurgency of 1948 and the ensuing state of emergency. Nevertheless, rubber production resumed profitably, and the companies were able to invest in improved living quarters and facilities for staff and labourers. During the 1950s the Barlows also diversified their business by ventures in Africa, investing in a tea company in Nyasaland and in a sawmill and rubber trading in Nigeria.
The Company Thomas Barlow & Brother Ltd included a number of subsidiary and associated organisations including:
- Gould & Co
- Barlow’s Umbrellas Ltd
- Executors of Sir J E Barlow
- The Monastery Bonded Tea Warehouse Company Ltd
- Julia Court
- Chadwick and Roberts Ltd
- Lingholm Trust
The Thomas Barlow Group also included the following companies which dealt with trade and investments in the Far East with offices in Singapore and Malaysia.
- Barlow Textiles Ltd
- Barlow & Co Ltd
- Associated Holdings Ltd
Barlow & Griffiths appears to have been a holding company formed when the company was winding down operations during the 1960s.